Gratiot House Farm

This building is the last reminder of Gratiot’s Grove, a mining settlement founded by Henry Gratiot and his brother, which for a time was one of the largest communities in Wisconsin’s lead-mining region. The Gratiots had migrated upriver from St. Louis, and aided by Catherine Myott, a métis woman of mixed Ho-Chunk and French descent, they received permission from the Indigenous Ho-Chunks to establish a mining claim. Henry Gratiot soon came to dominate the local economy, owning one of the area’s two smelters, a general store, and a flour mill, and he co-owned a sawmill. He lived in this handsome limestone ashlar house only a short time before he died in 1836, but it remained in his family.

The original structure was an I-house, strictly symmetrical with spare detailing—stone lintels over the first-story windows and a simple frieze and cornice. Sometime in the 1850s, the Gratiot family added a second story to the east wing and appended a second two-story block with a hipped roof. By the 1890s, the lead-mining boom ended, and this settlement was abandoned. Beginning in 2010, Chris Price and Heather Walker rehabilitated the house as an inn, open seasonally.